Volunteers can support instruction and improve student reading outcomes

Educationdive | February 04, 2019

We have a very diverse student body with a wide range of academic needs and strengths. Wanting to “fill a gap” in our students’ literacy proficiency — without taking additional time away from instruction to assess individual students — we started looking for a solution to streamline and improve our current instruction and assessment processes.We found what we were looking for in the Lexia Reading Core5 literacy program and implemented the solution in the fall of 2015 for grades K–5. Initially, we didn’t require all of our teachers to use the program as we wanted them to find a personal value in the program, not view it as just another mandate. For those teachers who decided to jump in and begin the implementation, the expectation was that they use it with fidelity to see how it supported their students’ literacy growth and development (with students meeting their recommended minutes and teachers logging in at least once a week to review the student performance data). We initially built implementation around our early adopters who found immediate value in how the personalized student instruction was delivered and the progress monitoring data was provided without having to administer a test. We then built out our district-wide implementation from there.To support our mission of improving student literacy proficiency, we also trained our AmeriCorps members, located in 26 buildings across the district, to be able to deliver the offline instruction provided by the program. The following five strategies have ensured that those volunteers can effectively support instruction and have led to improved student reading outcomes.

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